[CLIP] Why Many Chronic Diseases Are Preventable—And Why No One Tells You This: Dr. Robert Lufkin

so people are eating all the time eating itself uh drives inflammation inflammation is our normal response to food being in our in our gut so anytime anytime I eat something the body normally gets a little inflamed just as a protection of that foreign protein that foreign material coming into the body so if you think about it if you want to improve your diet and you don't want to change what you're eating you can still improve your health improve your diet by just not eating all the time in other words uh narrow your eating window cut out between meal snacks maybe even skip breakfast maybe even skip lunch I mean I eat one meal a day and I've never felt better I don't get brain fog in the middle of the day and I'm in something called ketosis nearly all the time and um I I think that's the for me it's the healthy way to be and I love it so you know I started a keto diet years ago I kind of you know I kind of go on and off of it right but just simply as a weight loss thing and it actually worked incredibly well it works incredibly well when you're in that state of ketosis right the fat is being uh burned instead of carbohydrates there's not there there aren't carbohydrates to burn I guess and ketosis I mean if you think about it human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years as primarily hunter gatherers and uh at that point if you're a hunter gatherer you're you eat when you you have a kill at you may go for a period of a week or so with fasting at which point you're in ketosis and it wasn't until what 12,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution which uh Jared Diamond who wrote Guns Germs and Steel and and even nuval Harari who wrote sapiens both of them famously agree that the worst possible thing that the human beings have done was with the development of Agriculture and and you can see why because agriculture made food available nearly constantly and that was accelerated of course with refrigeration and junk foods but but as food became more and more available people did not go into ketosis because there wasn't this period of fasting between the hunt and the and the kill and that amazing thing about ketosis is as I researched it more it doesn't just help diabetes but ketosis helps uh cancer it's a it's a cancer treatment or an adjunct to chemotherapy for patients in Alzheimer's disease patients ketosis is for many of them uh helps bring back their memory so one could argue that kosis is the the Natural Healthy state of human beings throughout history until literally the last 12,000 years and some of the most amazing things about ketosis are in neurodegenerative diseases you know we we talked a little bit off camera about guon Beret syndrome and and it's seen with Parkinson's disease and certainly with with seizures ketosis is fasting which drives ketosis is an accepted treatment for seizures 2,000 years ago there's a whole work about how junk food drives violence in in kids some these are correlation studies not not controlled prospective studies so causality can't be AER inferred but there's certainly some correlations with uh people eating junk food and being more Angry being more depressed uh being more anxious so it's it's it's really exciting some of the possibilities that are out there now well you know there's a couple of things that come to mind the first one I wanted to mention you mentioned The Agrarian Revolution a couple of uh uh a couple of people agree that it's kind of you said the worst thing that happened to humanity well it also AR arguably you know civilization comes from it it wasn't like all bad right right but it's but in ter you're saying in terms of the body in terms of the body and I and I certainly when I heard that I I thought well this can't be true civilization you know it allowed people to have philosopher classes working classes you know different classes of people with spare time when the food was save but but interestingly there's you know there's now evidence that there were some relatively Advanced civilizations much earlier than we thought like plye and turkey simar another site near that in Egypt as well so so um the before the Agricultural Revolution it's there it may not be that we were all walking around in caves you know Hunter Hunter gathers but but you're right it is a balance there there were benefits of Agriculture right well well you know the thing is that that it doesn't have to be one it doesn't have to be one or the other either you know in a way we've been conditioned to believe believe that a pill or some kind of medical intervention is what's going to solve our problem like we've kind of given away our you know responsibility for our health to the doctors and that is also translated into the use of all sorts of medications which many of which also interact with each other in negative ways and people you know I've heard incredibly bizarre statistics about how many medications some people take you just think to yourself my God that they they all have side effects right and and you know the more you take the more likely one of those things will come up and some of them are hidden some of them will come later you know we're just we're just like a highly medicalized Society I and I it's a great point I think part of it too as we talked about if I go to a doctor I'd much rather have a pill than get a lecture about I need to exercise more and you know change my diet because I I used to believe that lifestyle didn't really matter and what really worked was a pill and furthermore I used to believe and many people still believe that taking the pill will actually not just treat the symptoms of their disease but will actually control the disease and make them healthier and that's really not not true in in many if not most cases for example in Diabetes Type 2 diabetes giving the patient insulin and Metformin to control the blood sugar spikes doesn't really control the long-term effects of the disease you still continue to progress on your diabetes you get your foot amputated you get your renal failure you get your blindness you get your heart attack you get your Alzheimer's so I think people aren't aware that in many cases these pills don't really solve the problem they just treat the symptoms and the interesting thing is there's no pill for metabolic disease there's no pill that you can take that will uh reverse these things metabolic disease is driven by lifestyle and lifestyle is really the the secret to it well and the and the collery as we're we've kind of been touching on right is that you have to be responsible no one's going to do it for you right like whether it's Congress versus agencies I mean these bureaucracies develop in ways to kind of avoid create avoid a locus of responsibility at any cost right I mean and and and just it's like almost like a theme in our society where I I want some kind of external factor to fix things exactly I I love this about your show questioning the narratives asking the big questions about science and other things in our society and and to your point we need to take responsibility a lot of medicine over the last you know the 20th century it developed a very paternalistic attitude you know you let the doctor take care of everything they're going to take care of anything and and you you you turn over all responsibility to the doctor and the problem with that is as we've seen that the doctor doesn't control your lifestyle I control my lifestyle we all control our lifestyle so we need to learn that that we're in charge of our health not the doctor if I recall correctly like half of what uh professors in medical school teach their students is wrong at least right I think that's your that that's very disturbing news one of the greatest Physicians of all time uh Sir William Osler uh famously made one of the greatest comments about medical education when he addressed a group of medical students on the day of their graduation uh to being becoming Physicians he said gentlemen and at the time most most medical students were were male if not gentlemen at least he said gentlemen I have a confession to make half of what we've just taught You Is Wrong the problem is we don't know which half people who understand medical education or even science itself will know this is a process of science it's all about questioning the existing narrative and and throwing out the stuff that's incorrect and learning the new stuff but but uh sir Willam oser pointed it out beautifully and that's the theme for for my book with the you know the clickbait title lies I taught in medical school but it basically it goes through the half of things that I taught were wrong and uh hopefully can help people avoid the mistakes that I made and you know uh nearly uh cost me my my health and and my life don't forget to subscribe to our alerts newsletter and you'll never miss an episode